With the expansion of the Internet as a social tool, the number and types of sites that facilitate social networking and information sharing have greatly increased. Among the most popular of these sites include those that provide the ability to create a unique profile that link to a social network (MySpace and Friendster), those that provide online picture albums (Flickr) and those that allow users to create a “blog” (Blogspot) that might be accessed by any individual with internet access. The exact form and function of these sites vary, however they all tend to provide some means of establishing an individual page or set of pages, and allow a user to navigate through the network to view the pages of other users in some form of a network. Two common features of sites that provide for photo sharing are that they also allow users to comment on their pictures and on pictures uploaded by others, and provide the content owner with the ability to control access to their picture, in order to protect their individual privacy.
One such social networking site that allows users to comment on digital images is Flickr, digital photo-sharing website and web-services suite. In order to provide for privacy protection, Flickr allows users to control access to groups of photos based upon a viewer's status within their contact list, whether they are family, friends or a non-contact. However, the Flickr system is optimized to share comments openly between all users where comment data is saved related to the unique instance of the photograph. Such a system is seen as the most practical for the purposes of a basic photo-sharing site, however it is not optimal in the case where multiple instances of the same file photo exist in different electronic locations, and viewers of one instance of the photo want to know what other comments are made relative to other instances of the photo.
Another popular means of publishing photos on the internet is Facebook, a commercially available site at http://facebook.com, which allows members to identify other members within photos and comment on photos. While users are able to comment on both their own photos and those photos uploaded by those within their network, this model also fails to associate instances of the same photos uploaded under different names and by different users, and fails to aggregate comments between all instances of the same photograph in a manner that allows users that upload a photograph to read content related to that photograph written by other users.
Another site that allows users to navigate through directories or photos is Riya, which is a commercially available site at http://riya.com. The site is a photo search engine, which enables users to search through an existing reservoir of Internet pictures for objects or individuals. Specifically, it provides a search tool which allows users to identify a picture and find pictures across the available database. It further allows users to fine-tune the results based upon picture properties such as color, shape and texture of the photograph. The site also provides a “Personal search service” that allows users to train a search engine to come to recognize faces common within a user's pictures. It is premised that by honing the ability to recognize the faces of selected subjects within pictures, the precise searching of a network of photographs for those faces is facilitated. The search and comment sharing methodology employed at the Riya site is purposed differently from the present invention and thus, when considering the Riya functionality from an informational sharing perspective, it suffers from a number of drawbacks. Specifically, Riya provides for the comparison of like photographs to the end goal of enabling photo searching and generating search results. It does not provide the methods and systems to consolidate and share data across unique instances of the same photo toward the end of creating a profile that endures beyond an individual instance of the photo. Such a system would allow users that have common photographs to generate and manage data related to the photograph together with other users maintaining a separate instance of the same photograph.
The present invention addresses the foregoing needs.